Don’t let your AI agent send marketing messages

Reason one: the price is different

When a customer writes to you, everything you send back inside the next 24 hours is a service message. Meta does not charge for the first 1,000 a month on each number; after that, a service message to India is Meta’s service rate plus your plan’s percentage, from ₹0.12 on Pro to ₹0.14 on Pay as you go.

A marketing template is a message you start. To India it costs Meta’s marketing rate plus your plan’s percentage: ₹1.04 on Pay as you go, ₹0.99 on Starter, ₹0.97 on Growth, ₹0.93 on Scale, ₹0.91 on Pro. Rates are Meta’s card effective October 1, 2026, before GST.

An agent replying inside chats is working at the cheap end. An agent starting conversations is working at the expensive end, and an AI reply is charged on top either way.

Reason two: the rules are different

Meta allows a business to start a conversation only with an approved template, and a marketing template only to people who opted in to hear from you. A person deciding who gets a campaign can check both. An agent improvising a follow-up to “people who might be interested” can get both wrong at scale.

Reason three: your quality rating

Unwanted messages get blocked and reported, and Meta’s quality rating for your number reflects that. A low rating limits how many people you can message. A campaign a person planned can be paused; an agent’s follow-ups trickle out one by one until the rating has already dropped.

What to do instead

Give the agent the tools for conversations customers start: answering, showing products, noting what the customer wants, tagging them. Leave sending templates out of its tool list.

Plan marketing as broadcasts to opted-in segments, with a template a person approved. If you want the agent’s judgement in it, let it tag interested customers during conversations, and build next week’s segment from the tag.